French police shoot, arrest ‘ISIS’ gas car suspect

French police investigating a car containing six gas cylinders in Paris have arrested three female suspects said to have been planning fresh attacks, shooting one of them in the process.

A police officer also suffered a knife wound during the arrest late Thursday of the three women – aged 39, 23 and 19 – who were preparing “new violent … and imminent actions”, according to Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

The woman shot, a daughter of the car’s owner, had sworn allegiance to ISIS, according to a source close to the investigation.

A local resident who saw the women just before their arrest in Boussy-Saint-Antoine, south of Paris, said they “seemed anxious, looking around them all the time”.

When confronted, “one young women pulled out a knife and stabbed a police officer at stomach level”, Joachim Fortes Sanchez, 21, told AFP. “It all happened very fast”.

Four people – two brothers and their girlfriends – were already in custody over the car, found just a few hundred meters (feet) from the Notre Dame cathedral in central Paris, an area always thronged with tourists.